Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Sama-Veda spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: “Your soul is the whole world.” It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees.”

— Hermann Hesse

302. “Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.”

— Hermann Hesse

303. “Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form... He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.”

— Hermann Hesse

304. “That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.”

— Hermann Hesse

305. “The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.”

— Hermann Hesse

306. “The water changed to vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed a new, flowed anew.”

— Hermann Hesse

307. “Only when I found myself sitting in front of you did I realize that my wish was only half fulfilled and that my sole aim was to sit next to you.”

— Hermann Hesse

308. “Kamaswami conducted his business with care and often with passion, but Siddhartha looked upon all of this as if it was a game, the rules of which he tried hard to learn precisely, but the contents of which did not touch his heart.”

— Hermann Hesse

309. “Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.”

— Hermann Hesse

310. “I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue and accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and have just been born today.”

— Hermann Hesse

311. “The person who truly wants nothing except his destiny no longer has others of his own kind; he stands completely alone and has only the chill of outer space around him. You know, that’s Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.”

— Hermann Hesse

312. “Escribir es cosa buena, pero mejor es pensar. La prudencia es buena, pero la paciencia es mejor.”

— Hermann Hesse

313. “Even as a child I had had at intervals a fondness for observing strange forms in nature, not so much examining them as surrendering myself to their magic, their oblique message. Long tree-roots, coloured veins in rock, patches of oil floating on water, flaws in glass – all such things had a certain fascination for me, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust and expecially the swirling specks of colour which swam before my closed eyes.”

— Hermann Hesse

314. “Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.”

— Hermann Hesse

315. “Love of God is not always the same as love of good.”

— Hermann Hesse

316. “Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.”

— Hermann Hesse

317. “After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine.”

— Hermann Hesse

318. “But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words.”

— Hermann Hesse

319. “Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.”

— Hermann Hesse

320. “For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”

— Hermann Hesse

321. “I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Under the Circumstances’. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.”

— Hermann Hesse

322. “That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow – all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected.”

— Hermann Hesse

323. “A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real.”

— Hermann Hesse

324. “The world has become lovelier. I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness. I don’t want life to be anything other than what it is.”

— Hermann Hesse

325. “In reality there was only one thing you dreaded: letting yourself fall, taking the step into uncertainty, the little step beyond all the securities that existed. And whoever had once surrendered himself, one single time, whoever had practiced the great act of confidence and entrusted himself to fate, was liberated. He no longer obeyed the laws of earth; he had fallen into space and swung along in the dance of the constellations. That was it.”

— Hermann Hesse

326. “The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.”

— Hermann Hesse

327. “You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”

— Hermann Hesse

328. “Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.”

— Hermann Hesse

329. “To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.”

— Hermann Hesse

330. “His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.”

— Hermann Hesse

331. “The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.”

— Hermann Hesse

332. “Liberation from ego is what we shramanas are seeking, O Exalted One. If I were your disciple, O Venerable One, I’m afraid it might befall me that my ego would be pacified and liberated only seemingly, only illusorily, that in reality it would survive and grow great, for then I would make the teaching, my discipleship, my love for you, and the community of the monks into my ego!”

— Hermann Hesse

333. “It seems to have been my bad luck always to receive more than I could return, from life and friends.”

— Hermann Hesse

334. “In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.”

— Hermann Hesse

335. “Govinda was standing in front of him, dressed in the yellow robe of an ascetic. Sad was how Govinda looked like, sadly he asked: Why have you forsaken me? At this, he embraced Govinda, wrapped his arms around him, and as he was pulling him close to his chest and kissed him, it was not Govinda any more, but a woman, and a full breast popped out of the woman’s dress, at which Siddhartha lay and drank, sweetly and strongly tasted the milk from this breast.”

— Hermann Hesse

336. “First you must climb the Mountain of Knowledge, then you must perform some deeds, and finally you must find love and become happy.”

— Hermann Hesse

337. “None of us knew how terribly these two fine people suffered in secret. I do not think that they ever stopped loving each other, but deep down in their nature they did not belong to one another.”

— Hermann Hesse

338. “What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?”

— Hermann Hesse

339. “What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.”

— Hermann Hesse

340. “I have become weary and distrustful of teaching and learning, and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers.”

— Hermann Hesse

341. “A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.”

— Hermann Hesse

342. “Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.”

— Hermann Hesse

343. “She taught him, that lovers must not part from one another after celebrating love, without one admiring the other, without being just as defeated as they have been victorious, so that with none of them should start feeling fed up or bored and get that evil feeling of having abused or having been abused.”

— Hermann Hesse

344. “That seems to be the way of things. Everyone takes, everyone gives. Life is like that.”

— Hermann Hesse

345. “Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world. Many a one never becomes a human-being, but remains a frog, lizard, or ant. Many a one is a human-being above and a fish below.”

— Hermann Hesse

346. “I’m not kidding. I’m telling you what I’ve found. Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught. This was what I, even as a young man, sometimes suspected, what has driven me away from the teachers.”

— Hermann Hesse

347. “Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”

— Hermann Hesse

348. “We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awaking, and we were striving for an ever more perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd.”

— Hermann Hesse

349. “The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself.”

— Hermann Hesse

350. “The mother of life could be called love or desire; she could also be called death, grave, or decay. Eve was the mother. She was the source of bliss as well as of death; eternally she gave birth and eternally she killed; her love was fused with cruelty. The longer he carried her image within him, the more it became a parable and a sacred symbol to him. Not.”

— Hermann Hesse